Mastodon provides the highest (over 12%) engagement under posts
climatejustice.rocks
climatejustice.rocks
A more likely explanation is that fewer followers means higher engagement, which totally makes sense; for a larger social network account with 100k+ followers, many of those will be bots and people who follow anyone and everyone without really caring. A smaller account will only have followers who care.
I don't think there's anything specific about Mastodon here other than it being a smaller social network so you naturally have far fewer followers.
In either case, this is a single account talking about a single post, and shouldn't be used to generalize different levels of engagement across social networks.
These numbers tell me that:
1. Mastodon users are engaged, with an active mind.
2. The grifters/leeches/scammers and their bot legions haven't invaded yet.
Unfortunately, they have already started. In early May several instances limited mastodon.social due to a large amount of cryptocurrency spam.
https://mastodon.social/@Gargron/110310670042459716
I haven’t followed the case closely so can’t provide much insight, but a web search might return more information.
There are a few holes glaring holes in this methodology but just one is that she has 8.7k followers in Mastodon since joining in late 2022, while she has 241k followers on twitter since 2009. It's not surprising that the users that followed her in the last 5 months are more engaged than the ones that followed her in the previous 14 years. Are the people that just aren't interested in her content or that just stopped using twitter after a 14 year span necessarily grifters/leeches/spammers?
I don't know about 1 but simply due to scale 2 is probably true, however this experiment isn't saying much.
On Twitter, with over 8K followers, I get very good engagement in general (imo). But on Mastodon, with only 1.7K followers, I'll get engagement of almost 50% that of Twitter whenever I duplicate posts. If I had 8K followers on Maston and if those numbers continued the same trend I'd probably drop Twitter altogether.
Off-topic I also find the folks that comment on my posts on Mastodon to be friendly by default. It's a very refreshing vibe.
For a much smaller audience, I'm seeing a very active user base for the topics at hand. It also helps that I tag my posts in Mastodon (like people do on Instagram) to help increase reach a little bit.
They are, unfortunately, on their way; just had my first crypto spam on Mastodon the other day.
The more likely explanation is feed manipulation by as demonstrated most prominently by FB where "following" is barely more than a suggestion to the algorithm.
but... The main difference with Mastodon here is there is no fancy algorithm. It's just a chronological timeline.
So as a user, you quickly unfollow people who waste your time with uninteresting posts. Whereas on algorithm-driven services (literally every other social network) the algorithm will suppress posts of people you don't engage with, but leave you showing as following them (even though you don't see their posts)
So with mastodon no matter how big the network gets, you'll always have fewer followers (as bored people unfollow you) but they will be more engaged (as your posts are never hidden)
It never really caught up; I have been occasionally upgrading but almost never used it. A few days ago I finally put some effort to follow interesting accounts.
The ability to control what I see (e.g. exclude boosts, no personalized timeline etc.) made me realize how much more engaging it was compared to, let's say, Twitter. It was pretty refreshing to see a no-nonsense timeline and to be able to tailor the interface to my needs (I used the 3-column layout).
I haven't been on Twitter for a while, but I think I'll give Mastodon a try as a replacement.
What do you mean by this? Twitter has following, likes, watch time, Not interested in this tweet, etc which give you agency on your recommendations.
Mastadon gives you less agency over your feed because it has a primitive recommendation system which isn't able to find as relevant posts as twitter's can.
I don’t care for viral posts. I want the things I read to be informative. It doesn’t need to drive clicks or make a lot of revenue from me.
This makes a lot of sense because instead of seeing everything an account posts, most of which may not be what your are interested in, following hashtags means you will see all posts related to your interests, even if you're not following any accounts.
On Mastodon, if I enjoyed something I can share that with the author without all sorts of side effects. That leads to higher visible engagement on Mastodon. I believe this is why Twitter had to share the viewer stats--people have stopped liking as frequently.
I really think that sharing activity without an explicit user-driven action is poisonous to the platforms that do it.
I’ll admit that I’m friends with two Facebook warriors, and while it was sometimes enjoyable I eventually ended up muting them after they met each other in some political discussion and I felt like I had unlocked some sort of achievement. (They don’t know each other).
Outside programming, my interests of left wing issues + community [building] have me primarily interact with women and sites like FB are still over represented in their usage.
I don’t think I have a friend who I didn’t meet online who uses FB.
It’s actually quite annoying. I’ve been trying to move a community I manage away from FB, FBM for a while too.
> they met each other in some political discussion and I felt like I had unlocked some sort of achievement. (They don’t know each other).
Funny
In the first Mastodon wave I thought about setting my own server with my domain and it sounded awesome, but of course, I never did. In this second one, I just went the mainstream way and was done.
What impact does it have if you change your mind later?
I have personally never looked, but the people talking here about actual conversations with a small number of people make it sound interesting.
I just picked one from my geographic region, all good!
(I am on doll.social and mastodon.social, and found that it's impossible for users from the former to follow users on the latter.)
Go to https://joinmastodon.org/servers or https://instances.social/ and find one or more instances you want to join. Use the same account name (but not password, obviously) for all of them. Think of instances as subreddits, but each subreddit is on its own separate server.
You can manage those identities though a third party app or just a folder of browser bookmarks.
If you're already on Twitter, you can find anyone on your follow list who is also on Mastodon and follow them. You'll wind up with a json file you'll need to upload for each account. It's easy to join or leave instances so there's nothing to worry about.
The better way would be to manage your own identity server but i'm not there yet.
2. start following people
3. if you notice that a lot of people you are following are on a particular server, consider getting an account there and using the account migration tools to move all your current followers over there
4. alternatively, set up your own server, maybe just for you, maybe for some of your friends and/or family, with your own set of rules and a manifesto that is perfectly sensible and not weird at all because it is yours.
The content is also structured in a twitter microblog + replies style. So I'm seeing basically private forums of old, but twitter format and some weird soft discovery thing.
Overall I like the idea of federation, but mastadon seems half baked. I signed up and I'll get it a try for a week or so though.
If you look at your own feed on these networks you will notice how you are yourself more engaged with the feed on Mastodon because it's largely about people you have chosen to follow.
I’m trying to work around that for now, but it’s a challenging hurdle and makes any community/follower building an exceedingly long term prospect. I’m guessing it’s overwhelmingly controversial. See any climate thread or comment section on major platforms on scientific climate content. It’s nasty.
I miss the scientists, journalists, comedians and even, though it pains me even to type this, the politicians.
I used movetodon.org, so I follow everyone that did move. It's just that a lot of them didn't.
Expecting a one to one drop in network swap seems like a consistent barrier, no shade intended.
I don't agree with it but I guess I get it. My feed has a little tech but mostly science, authors, artists, and ground level activists. But almost no one I already knew, and of them one is a roommate and one is an amazing but very local author I already supported on Patreon. I'm actually meeting new people and actually getting to know a lot about them.
It's much more interesting to see individual real humans doing things to make the world better than to just read them commenting on it.
I'm kind of done following big names personally. The added value is overblown relative to how awesome strangers actually often are, plus strangers don't have a communications team filtering out anything too interesting.
If you miss seeing big names, though, and let's not pretend there's no appeal in that, Mastodon is lacking.
I actually just have manual bookmarks to Twitter pages of the like half dozen people I think are at all worth reading. And then I use libredirect (https://libredirect.github.io/) to avoid hitting the actual Twitter website so I don't have to log in (don't have an account anyway) and don't see nonsense recommended posts.
I assume that will break with API changes, at which point I just won't read those people anymore unless they cross post on Mastodon. But it's worked well so far.
Obviously eliminates any possibility of trying to win the comments section, but I don't really see that as a true negative.
Thank you for this! I know of and use some of these already, just from luck of discovery, and having a compilation of several more is so freeing!
But there was a period where I could do it all on Twitter and it was convenient. Perhaps it was never meant to be, as the incentives are kind of twisted.
Anyone know of another service?
I think the absolute graphs are pretty convincing that there's a lot more going on than this, but it's gotta be a big factor.
On top of this, it is much more likely that a new account or follower is a bot nowadays.
Sure a ton of your old friends still post on FB, it's still very popular.
But I'm sure a ton don't. They still count in the follower count of anyone they followed.
And the ones who still post on FB have had a decade of following things but still only have one person's worth of attention; they're not engaging everyone they followed.
A new Mastodon follower, by comparison, is very likely to still be logging in and engaging with you, given they just chose to engage with you by logging in and following. And they don't have 10 years worth of other accounts they've followed vying for their attention on that platform.
The engagement rate against followers is lower, but Twitter dwarfs everything else in engagement for the author.
In the end, Elon Musk seems to have come through.
This person is testing just one piece of content, but in aggregate, I'm not sure you would see the same. Recommended content on other platforms makes it possible to have lots of engagement even with zero followers, to "bootstrap" your audience in ways that Mastodon doesn't support.
The biggest difference between these platforms is how much, as a content creator, you "own" your followership. On Mastodon there isn't a lot of second guessing by the platform - your stuff goes to your followers about the same every time. Most other platforms treat followers as a kind of vanity metric that gives content producers a way to measure up and monetize off platform, but it's not a primary driver of content distribution anymore - neither are your followers guaranteed to see what you post, nor do you have to get followers to help your content be seen by anyone.
It sounds user-hostile that the main social media platforms "don't give users what they want", by more or less ignoring their expressed desire to follow someone, but it's the opposite. Platforms that are dominant today grew their audience by following this playbook through the 2010's, because in the end, it works for users.
Now what it does pose, from the content producers point of view, is fairness problems. A lot of the whining about bad performance is in fact just because - sorry folks - the content plainly suck, and rather than show sucky content to followers, the platforms show better content. But it's also true that it's easier to find ways to characterize the algorithms as unfair to an individual producer. The platforms grow the pie in aggregate but as a producer you lose control. The "fediverse" offers control and transparency, but what remains to be seen is whether it can do so while remaining an engaging platform for a sizeable enough chunk of the population to matter.
Now the numbers for overall engagement compared with the rest of the other social networks?
This time no dismissals like 'You can't compare Mastodon to <INSERT VERY FAMOUS SOCIAL NETWORK>'
A decade ago I experimented with dual-posting to FB and ... whatever that Ruby-based alternative was, that Zuck famously invested in, but to which I have zero memory of the name right now. A friend described it at the time as 'shouting into the void'. I still thought it was worthwhile to duplicate posts manually -- automatic federation was obviously never going to happen, so it was an ethical duty to ease others into the new world.
I think we were perhaps a decade too early. I'm on mastodon now, of course, although only as a consumer. And I somehow missed the myspace epoch entirely. So witnessing in real-time the implosion of twitter is quite the delight.
I think you're referring to Diaspora.
- Website: https://diasporafoundation.org/
- Source code: https://github.com/diaspora/
- Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diaspora_(social_network)
I mean, what's getting choked here : free speech or right speech?
I feel you're teasing us with a potentially contentious position on .. something, when you could be just stating that position(s).
I'm not sure what that implies, if anything other than what I just said, but if you want to discuss "hot topics" I have no idea what you think is stopping you.
If people think you suck they'll just stop reading what you say, same as real life. It's no big deal.
Alternatively, follow hashtags that you are interested in. I follow dozens of hashtags but only follow a few accounts of people that I know I want to see all their posts.
People of all stripes and colors got trapped there, pure and simple. But the escape hatch is now open thanks to amazing vision and work by pioneers. They mostly happen to have certain "views". Altruism is strong with that crowd. But that is actually irrelevant in the scheme of things.
The big issues of our time will come to be debated in the fediverse and people will re-engage as this post already hints.
The precise manner remains to be seen. Polarization and online strife cannot be wished away. Moderation will have to become a true civic skill.
But its pretty obvious that having to fight manipulative algorithms and dark patterns and "being the product" will never work better in this respect than the what you see is what you get fediverse.
Even here we pay the "small price" of Y Combinator posts being boosted and comment-free in our feeds. And any time subjects like homelessness or rent control or zoning come out, most of HN loses their effing minds and the seething anger (about rent prices in NY/SF) and hatred of the poor washes over the whole thread like a tidal wave.
The way I see it, Mastodon is just the place where all of the smug, self-righteous people have gone -- to the benefit of the rest of us.
You also have enormous inertia and network effects to overcome for people to switch. Many simply disengage or opt for the least bad option. In any case most flavors of the fediverse not ready for mass market from a ux perspective.
What is interesting about the fediverse at the current stage is that it has established beyond doubt the viability of flexible new patterns for how to organize social platforms. An enormous step but it will require many more before its the new normal.
Because the narrative needs twitter to fail.
Also, author admits to being (or suspecting being) shadow-banned by Facebook when posting about climate, citing the belief that her post about those topics reaches only a small percentage of followers.
More at 7.
I can't see praising this as a good thing. The vast majority _of people_ do not post things online. Now you just have an extremely small community of talkers.
Imagine instead that social media was a house party. In the case of Mastodon, only 5 people showed up, but they talk endlessly about every (or their specific niche) topic. You wouldn't want to be there.
I recommend an alternative to mastodon with greater openness that you may wish to check out: twitter.com.
I assume pleroma (sp?) or truth social or whatever it was that uses Mastodon code posted many articles about the evidence they found when they removed it from being hardcoded in the open source code they worked from.
Or is it still in their hard coding too?
Eesh. I think this person must be talking about manual blocking by moderators that happened so fast it seemed automatic? Seems like they just joined the wrong server.
Pleroma isn't a fork of Mastodon and I can't find Truth Social claiming anything like this about Mastodon's code, so I don't think this is it. Perhaps Mastodon is being confused with a different social network that used to have a hard-coded "slur filter": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33615058
Pleroma is a fork of Mastodon, it's not the site I was thinking of though. I was thinking of Parler, which has nothing to do with Mastodon.
Truth Social, on the other hand, definitely tried to use Mastodon code. It was pretty funny drama when they had to release some of their code under the GPL.
https://www.theverge.com/2021/10/29/22752850/mastodon-trump-...
Truth Social does use Mastodon's code with the federation features stripped out like Gab, but what I meant was that I couldn't find any reports of Truth Social claiming to have evidence of hard-coded political censorship in Mastodon (other than the generic blocking features found in most social networks).
As for the login block itself it's there: https://github.com/tuskyapp/Tusky/blob/01b3cb3a53b1e08ed26e7...
For a while F-Droid considered forcing all clients to implement such a ban but in the end they decided against it, see https://f-droid.org/en/2019/07/16/statement.html
Also, Gab has a lot of content that is prohibited on Twitter, but allowed on a self-hosted instance of Mastodon. Mastodon would actually be of "greater openness" than Twitter in the case of Gab's content.